Image: "BALLOTS!" via CC BY-NC-ND 2.0. On why I ran on—and stepped down from—the CUNY Struggle slate (and the real story about the GC election "debate"). I. The Slate As a strong critic of liberal democracy—indeed, an opponent of it at this point, because, as I contend in my dissertation, it’s irreducibly a settler, racial-capitalist form—I should've known not to get so directly involved in liberal-democratic politics as to run in an election for union office. And yet I’d been wanting to form an alternative caucus within the Professional Staff Congress (PSC) for years—really, ever since I joined the Adjunct Project in July 2013 and quickly realized how undemocratic, top-down, and reactionary the dominant political party in the union, the 17-year-old “New” Caucus, is—and, more, run a slate of that caucus in a union election. Last December, that desire started to take shape when a few of us decided to form a caucus out of the extant CUNY Struggle formation and run a slate in this April’s Graduate Center (GC) chapter election. I’ve long been inspired by insurgent union formations, from MORE (which I touted in 2014) to the fantastic and awe-inspiring AWDU caucuses and the many member unions of CGEU, whose annual conference I attended in 2014 and which so galvanized me. And I floated the idea of forming an alternative to some of my friends in these circles, and to some GC friends as well. At first I wanted to form an AWDU caucus within the PSC, but... Continue reading

On Friday, September 30th, at Wayne State University in Detroit, I gave the following presentation at the 2016 Union for Democratic Communications conference. It's an excerpt from the third chapter of my dissertation, currently titled Original Gangsters: Genre, Crime, and Settler Democracy, a project in which I analyze the history and present of the gangster genre as a lens through which to better understand the dynamics of global governance, political economy, and social relations. After chapters that examine case studies set in India and South Africa, my third chapter is centered on the U.S. In this particular excerpt, I situate Fetty Wap's blockbuster hit, "Trap Queen," about a domestic relationship framed by the trap house where the two partners live and work, within genealogies of "trap spaces" stemming from Harriet Jacobs's "loophole of retreat" in Incidents in the Life of Slave Girl and the "burdened individuality" of post-emancipation black life as theorized by Saidiya Hartman. Further, I link this trapped, burdened individuality to the disciplinary pressures faced by university students of color, particularly black students, who are compelled to become "Breadwinner/Investor subjects of the nation-state," as Sylvia Wynter explains, or, failing that, remain on the outside of this over-represented genre of humanity. This is a work in progress, so I welcome any and all feedback. (NB: I've posted images with the slides on top, my remarks at the bottom; you can click each image for a closer view.) At this point in the presentation I played the first minute or... Continue reading

This summer/winter (the season depending on where you are globally) I was in Johannesburg doing archival research for the South African chapter of my dissertation on the relationship between cultural and media representations of crime and structural processes of criminalization in postcolonial—or settler-colonial—democracies. This research was funded by the Advanced Research Collaborative (ARC) at the Graduate Center, CUNY, through its Early Research Initiative (ERI) program for advanced doctoral students. I received an ERI Award for Archival Research in African American and African Diaspora Studies for $4,000, as I did also in 2015, when I pursued exploratory dissertation research at several archives in both Johannesburg and Cape Town. Between the two summers/winters, I've now completed the bulk of the archival research for my chapter on South Africa, so I'm immensely grateful to ARC for providing such funding: it's advanced my dissertation in numerous ways, both macro and micro. I wish, however, there were similar funding opportunities, through ARC or another Graduate Center (GC) entity, for research in other regions of the world aside from the Americas and the African continent, not just for my own research interests but for those of the many GC students whose projects don't take up the aforementioned continents. (Although, truth be told, there were one-off summer/winter/monsoon research grants provided in the spring of 2014 that were unrestricted as to location, and I received one to do exploratory archival research in Mumbai and Pune for the Indian chapter of my dissertation. It would be great if such... Continue reading

[Cross-posted at CUNY Struggle.] On Thursday, March 24th, the Professional Staff Congress (PSC) staged its second "civil disobedience" of the academic year, this time a die-in in front of the building that holds Governor Cuomo's New York City office. Like its "blockade" of the entry to the building that holds CUNY's central offices last November, the PSC trained participants who volunteered to risk arrest, and the NYPD dispatched those arrested to central booking, where they were released shortly after—the whole action a smooth operation carefully production-managed for maximum positive media exposure and minimum duress for participants. What couldn't be controlled, of course, was the reaction from observers, inside and outside the PSC, which ranged from adulation for those arrested to revulsion that the PSC once again colluded with cops to enact another fake civil disobedience (or civil disobedience "lite"), at a moment when many rank and filers would like to see the PSC hold a strike: a genuine civil disobedience, given the Taylor Law. Count us among the repulsed. Not only is normalizing the structural role of police, a repressive state apparatus, in this stagecraft deeply reactionary, it also elides the myriad ways the police—and the prison-industrial complex for which they serve as the front line—interfere in the lives and livelihoods of CUNY students and workers who are black and brown. Too, this elision amounts to a significant contradiction in the PSC-leadership-led contract campaign's tirelessly stated assertion that a new, fair contract is good for CUNY students (as some people... Continue reading

News circulating today about Beyoncé's (latest) possible performance in Tel Aviv prompted me to look at what Elaine Brown, longtime Black Panthers member and the group's chair for three years in the '70s, and an inspiration for the look of Beyoncé's dancers in her Super Bowl performance, might have had to say about Palestine. The Panthers, of course, were strong supporters of the Palestinians, particularly in the context of the group's overall resistance to U.S. and Western imperialism, but I wanted to see if Brown had written anything about this solidarity. I turned to her autobiography A Taste of Power: A Black Woman's Story (1992), cited on Twitter in response to Bey's half-time show. Although Brown doesn't offer her own thoughts on Palestine and the fight of Palestinians against the Israeli state's occupation and settlement of their land, she does recount the following (fascinating) details about Huey Newton's revision of the Panthers' political line on the situation: He renounced the party's Eldridge Cleaver-inspired position against the State of Israel. He sent a message to all Arab embassies and to that of Israel stating that the Black Panther Party now recognized both the State of Israel and the right of the Palestinian people to have a homeland. The party's position, as his message outlined, was that the Arab-Israeli dispute could be settled quickly if Saudi Arabia or Egypt, or some other territory controlled by the Palestinians' rich brothers—who had been claiming since 1948 to be pressing to help them reclaim Palestine—simply... Continue reading

This evening I gave the following remarks in the second of two special convention sessions on the boycott of Israeli academic institutions held by the Modern Language Association's Delegate Assembly Organizing Committee as part of the association's process of considering a resolution on boycott that could come at next year's convention. The four speakers in each session, two pro-boycott and two anti-boycott, were limited to seven minutes each, after which questions were posed to the speakers from the audience. I will refrain from characterizing the arguments of the anti-boycott side in my session but to mention that I was asked if I agreed "Muslims are terrorists." I said no, they're not—to say they are is Islamophobic. And that was the tip of the iceberg of the anti side's rhetoric... I first want to acknowledge that we’re on unceded Indigenous people’s land here in Austin. This past summer I was in South Africa doing research for my dissertation on criminalization, cultural representations of crime, and colonial and postcolonial social relations. While there, I met with organizers of the boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement, BDS for short, including current students and recent graduates of the University of Johannesburg, the University of Witwatersrand, and the University of Pretoria as well as members of Jewish Voices for a Just Peace, the South African analog to the U.S.-based Jewish Voice for Peace. I want to emphasize these two organizations at the outset of my remarks, since one of the popular criticisms of BDS, including the... Continue reading

Two things that everyone who shared or read news of the arrests outside of CUNY Central Wednesday night urgently needs to know: 1) The union pre-arranged the arrests with the NYPD. Those who agreed to be arrested were brought down the street, given a desk ticket, and released. Never mind that the union president claims the arrests were in part on behalf of the students of CUNY, who are routinely terrorized, harassed, and spied on by the NYPD—the union actively worked with the NYPD to stage their spectacle, and egregiously appropriated a civil-rights genealogy, and "racial justice," in their public rhetoric about it. 2) The demand of "CUNY Needs a Raise"—that is, the equal-percentage across-the-board wage increases that the union is bargaining for—will maintain and even increase the pay disparity between adjunct faculty and full-time faculty absent any other measure (such as a minimum starting salary of $7K). The union, as it has consistently done, contract after contract, is actually fostering inequality with this demand—no help from CUNY management or the state even needed. Instead of "CUNY needs a raise," we should be calling for pay equity for adjunct faculty, the majority of the faculty (59%) and the ones on the front lines of introductory classes filled with working-class students of color that CUNY is systematically trying to exclude. [Photo: "Stop & Frisk" by carnagenyc via CC BY-NC 2.0.] Continue reading

I'll be in South Africa doing dissertation research July 9-August 19. My basic itinerary and research sites follow, in case you'd like to connect with me there or know of folks with whom I can connect. Interested in discussing all aspects of South Africa, in particular its manifold relationships, historical and contemporary, to the U.S. and India, including vis-à-vis film, TV, and music cultures. July 9-16: Johannesburg/Pretoria (National Film, Video, and Sound Archive, Bailey's African History Archive) July 17-19: Durban (Durban International Film Festival) July 20-25: Johannesburg/Pretoria (as above + the University of Witwatersrand library) July 26-August 8: Cape Town (Centre for Popular Memory/University of Cape Town library) August 9-19: Johannesburg/Pretoria (as above) Continue reading

Further to my last post about Darren Wilson's deceitful grand-jury testimony, in which he claimed that Mike Brown seized his gun, Michael Slager, the South Carolina police officer who executed Walter Scott, also claimed that his victim got control of his weapon–until a witness's video showed no such thing. According to initial news reports, Slager and the North Charleston police department claimed that Scott and Slager struggled over Slager's Taser until Scott not only obtained the Taser but used it on Slager, which forced Slager to retaliate: Police allege that during the struggle the man gained control of the Taser and attempted to use it against the officer. The officer then resorted to his service weapon and shot him, police alleged. The video of this purported struggle, of course, shows no struggle—just Scott running away and posing zero threat to Slager. Similarly, Wilson too claimed there was a struggle between him and Brown—and note how the term "struggle" normalizes a profoundly asymmetric differential of power and violence—and that Brown also got control of the cop's weapon. Unsurprisingly, this was a matter of protracted attention during Wilson's testimony at the grand jury (pages 20/214 to 23/217): He immediately grabs my gun and says 'you are too much of a pussy to shoot me.' The way he grabbed me, do you have a picture? ... My gun was basically pointed this way. I'm in my car, he's here, it is pointed this way, but he grabs it with his right hand, not... Continue reading

Reading Darren Wilson's grand-jury testimony, it's abundantly clear he lied through his teeth, was not pressed on his contradictions, and, as many others have noted, conjured a (deeply genealogized) white fantasy-spectacle of black criminalization and death, first in Wilson's fantasy that he was going to be killed by a black man, then in his fantasy of killing a black man, which he succeeded in doing (and which he seemed to enjoy, especially now that he's gotten off without charge, as expected). But Wilson's likening of Mike Brown to Hulk Hogan, and himself to his five-year-old self, is perhaps the most telling part of this complex fantasy play: And he said, 'hey man, hold these.' And at that point I tried to hold his right arm because it was like this at my car. This is my car window. I tried to hold his right arm and use my left hand to get out to have some type of control and not be trapped in my car any more. And when I grabbed him, the only way I can describe it is I felt like a five-year-old holding onto Hulk Hogan. Holding onto a what? Hulk Hogan, that's just how big he felt and how small I felt just from grasping his arm. (212) Wilson, as we know, was a 6'4" armed police officer in a police car he could've driven away at any moment. Brown was a teenager Wilson wanted to fuck with by ordering him to get out of... Continue reading

A brief look back to resistance in South Africa, 1985, on this National Day of Protest Against Police Brutality, via the archive of the Black Consciousness Movement at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. #O22 #blacklivesmatter Continue reading

Opening a new front in the City University of New York's repression of Palestinian-solidarity activism, John Jay College president Jeremy Travis issued a campus-wide email late yesterday afternoon asserting that Palestinian-solidarity activism "fuel[s]" anti-Semitism. His statement comes after the CUNY Graduate Center administration asked the Doctoral Students' Council to pull the BDS resolution the body has been considering since mid-September, and after a top CUNY attorney denied that the university has sought to repress the efforts of Students for Justice in Palestine chapters, which a group of CUNY faculty had warned about in a collective letter to CUNY administration. Scroll down for the complete statement, which was issued at 5:33 p.m. yesterday and went to John Jay alumni as well. After stating that John Jay is "dedicated to our mission of 'educating for justice'"—an obvious appropriation of "Students for Justice in Palestine"—Travis went on to say that he is "deeply troubled, both personally and professionally, by recent reports that Jewish students at John Jay College have felt intimidated and harassed on our campus." He intensifies the rhetoric in the next paragraph, asserting that These instances on our campus occurred at a time when other parts of our country, and countries in Europe, are witnessing a rise in anti-Semitism. Universities are often a focal point for organizing activities that have fueled these trends. The rest of the statement employs the kind of platitudes automatically used to dress up such repression in the guise of "encourag[ing] free and open discussion," the particular... Continue reading

This week in English professor Kandice Chuh's class "Black, Brown, Yellow: On Ways of Being and Knowing," we're reading, among other texts, Hamid Dabashi's Brown Skin, White Masks (Pluto Press, 2011), in which, among other interventions, he critiques Arab and Muslim "comprador intellectuals" as the opposite of the Saidian exilic intellectual, or, that is, an intellectual or knowledge producer who serves the state and empire rather than contesting them. Indeed, he quotes Joseph Massad—whose academic freedom was violated when he became the subject of a well-known anti-Palestinian repression campaign several years back at Columbia—on the Palestinian version of this figure as such: Palestinian intellectuals who previously opposed the occupation, PLO concessions, and US hegemony, but now support, wittingly or unwittingly, all three....Palestinian intellectuals, attuned to the exigencies of political power and the benefits that could accrue to them from it, traded in their national liberation goals for pro-Western pragmatism. (42-43) Ghaith Al-Omari of the American Task Force on Palestine, who's having a "conversation" with an adviser to Secretary of State John Kerry tomorrow (Monday, October 20th), seems very much to fit this description. Not only has he worked closely with the accommodationist Palestinian Authority—the successor to the PLO—but his employer is principally committed to the "United States national interest" over that of Palestine or Israel, per the American Task Force on Palestine's mission statement. In other words, the conversation that's happening tomorrow is about U.S. power, and upholding it, and therefore will have very little to say about the prospects... Continue reading

Earlier today on the contingent-academics listserv adj-l, Cary Nelson complained about an article critiquing his support of Steven Salaita's ouster from the University of Illinois–Urbana-Champaign. His complaint rested on two charges: the first, that the Electronic Intifada had perpetrated "vicious slander" against him for describing his monitoring of Salaita's tweets as "monitoring" (which the article in question referenced), and, secondly, that the listserv member who posted the article exhibited "deep hatred" for Nelson simply because he circulated the article, one of numerous circulating critiques of Nelson at the moment. Other listserv members rallied to our colleague's side, including one who called for Nelson to recant his remarks, another who posted a number of readings on Nelson and the Salaita case, and a third who questioned Nelson's denial that he monitored Salaita's tweets. I also responded to Nelson, a response which I include here along with his statements to the listserv (the original one and a follow-up) as well as the quote from the article that caused his ire. I have redacted the first names of listserv members, except when I have received permission to include them, so that they aren't dragged publicly into the current debate vis-a-vis Nelson because I chose to post my response publicly. A link to the article in question was posted along with this quote: Professors and educators, who are experiencing a steady erosion of academic freedom along with pay and job cuts, should take Nelson's involvement in the Salaita case as a warning. They can... Continue reading

Last fall I focused the introductory composition class I taught at CUNY's Lehman College on stop-and-frisk and racial profiling at large. The course received the 2014 Diana Colbert Innovative Teaching Prize, awarded annually by the CUNY Graduate Center's Ph.D. Program in English. I post the materials I submitted here in the interest of open access: all of the following, except for my specific words, is free to use. If you've taught a similar class, let me know—perhaps we can build a site for such pedagogic and teaching materials. (Above image: "End Stop and Frisk" by sainthuck, licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0.) Rationale Black and Latino young men are highly disproportionately stopped-and-frisked by New York City police officers, particularly in the Bronx and Brooklyn. (For representative New York Police Department data collected by the New York Civil Liberties Union, see here and here.) Although the stop-and-frisk program has been in place since at least 2002, debate over its propriety and effectiveness reached a peak last summer due to the city's mayoral election, the media attention to now-mayor Bill De Blasio's "mixed-race" family, and a federal court's finding that stop-and-frisk violated both the 4th and 14th Amendments. At the same time, the George Zimmerman trial, which concluded with Trayvon Martin's killer being found not guilty, amplified controversy about racial profiling and state power. So, too, did widely noted cultural representations such as Kanye West's Yeezus album, with songs such as "New Slaves" and "Blood on the Leaves," a re-working of the anti-lynching... Continue reading

Vegas: a massive social system imbricated in a massive gaming system. Check all the cameras in the ornate ceiling of the poker room at the Bellagio. Continue reading

We are still actively receiving and inviting signatories to this open letter, but it has moved here. Please click the preceding hyperlink and leave a comment with your name and academic affiliation (if you have one). All are welcome in this effort to hold the union leadership accountable at the largest university by enrollment in the U.S.! Real democracy now! Dear Barbara— I write as a union member and CUNY contingent faculty member to express my great dismay at your statement of May 9th praising Mayor De Blasio for his CUNY budget and singling out "full-time faculty and student support staff" as needing "investments" while entirely omitting mention of adjuncts and graduate student workers. In addition to the questionable negotiating strategy of such mayoral sycophancy—and your bizarre contention that CUNY is the "solution" to "inequality," when CUNY reproduces, and contributes to, the inequality of New York City at large—I don't understand how you could ignore the needs of adjuncts and graduate student workers, who teach the vast majority of classes at CUNY and are the majority of union members and agency-fee payers. Furthermore, I don't understand how full-time faculty need "investments" more than adjuncts and graduate student workers, who make a pittance compared to full-time faculty, work under worse conditions, and lack job security. What kind of message does this send at negotiating time? Indeed, it seems to me that any "investments" in faculty the union wins from the city should go to adjuncts and graduate student workers and not... Continue reading

Amid the responses to [Wednesday's] news about the supremely cushy terms of Paul Krugman's hiring at the CUNY Graduate Center, three have stood out: 1) that the average adjunct salary per course at CUNY is ~$3,000, and Krugman will earn 75 times that to teach one seminar per year (and no teaching labor at all in his first year); 2) that Krugman's salary of $225,000 per academic year is either appropriate to his scholarly and public stature or that he's being underpaid at that rate; and 3) that his salary is actually a bargain because it will be well returned by virtue of the Graduate Center's enhanced profile and an attendant increase in private donations. To these responses I'd like to add: a) that there are 13 different funding levels for students at the Graduate Center (GC), ranging from zero dollars to $27,000 (as of last fall's data). Krugman's primary attachment will be to the GC's Luxembourg Income Study Center, the mission of which is to support the study of, among other phenomena, poverty and income inequality. The contradiction between these objects of study and the very subjects of poverty and income inequality at the GC is worth continually highlighting. Graduate students at the GC are at the mercy of funding—the funding inequities among us are the direct result of GC decision-making and priority-setting, working within the two-way interface with CUNY Central. Just last Friday we were at a meeting in which Interim President Robinson—the GC leader who fawned so... Continue reading

Towards the end of Walking With the Comrades, Arundhati Roy makes explicit a dynamic hitherto implicit in her account of Naxalite/Maoist/adivasi resistance to the Indian (corporate) state: the relationship between tactics and contexts. "People who live in situations like this do not have easy choices," she writes (207). "They certainly do not simply take instructions from a handful of ideologues who appear out of nowhere waving guns. Their decisions on what strategies to employ take into account a whole host of considerations: the history of the struggle, the nature of the repression, the urgency of the situation and, quite crucially, the landscape in which their struggle is taking place." After all, she adds, for "Gandhian satyagraha" "to be effective, it needs a sympathetic audience, which villagers deep in the forest do not have." Putting aside the question of violence for the moment, I want to think about the tactics Roy deploys in her representation of adivasi resistance, particularly in the book’s eponymous central narrative, and what the audience is for her intervention. Indeed, in my current seminar on postcolonial ecologies and their representations, we’ve seen three rather different attempts at representing indigenous/autochthonous experience and resistance: Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide, the three stories of Mahasweta Devi’s Imaginary Maps (translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak), and now Roy’s text. I tend to see the first as a principally aesthetic treatment, the second—complicated by various translation issues—as didactic, and the latter as descriptive or journalistic, but these are admittedly contingent categories. Put another... Continue reading

Following are the remarks I prepared for the closing plenary of the MLA Subconference last Thursday, on which I appeared, on behalf of the CUNY Adjunct Project, with Chris Newfield of the University of California–Santa Barbara, Kyle Shafer of Unite Here!, and Jimmy Casas Klausen of the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Though I veered from these particular words—I'd quickly handwritten them, in my near illegible script—the views are the same as I expressed in person, as you'll see on the archived livestream (which you should check for the other panelists' remarks and subsequent discussion). The photo above, by Lee Skallerup Bessette, shows an image, presented by Shafer, of hospitality workers in a vending machine—a specific depiction of how capitalism renders people in general: disposable. If we are to resist precarity, we must resist capitalism and its various deployments, as I try to show. First of all, and again, I want to thank the organizers of this very generative convening. Thank you all for inviting the CUNY Adjunct Project to appear, and thank you for your generously donated labor. And, frankly, it shouldn't be our job, as graduate students, to change the university. We have enough other things to do—research, write, teach, attend conferences on money we don't have—the list goes on—that we don't have time, let alone resources, to solve all the problems facing higher education too. But since the people with available time and resources—tenured faculty and faculty unions, administrators, disciplinary organizations and other academic bodies—apparently have no interest, nor... Continue reading

Props to the renegade Ph.D. students who organized the first-ever MLA Subconference, occurring this Wednesday and Thursday. I'm fortunate to be representing the CUNY Adjunct Project on the closing plenary, "Resisting Precarity." Continue reading

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Going in, I thought The Act of Killing was a documentary about the indigenous filmic practices of Indonesian paramilitary veterans, in which men who had killed thousands following the U.S.-backed overthrow of Suharto in '65 reckoned with their motives and tried to come to terms with their violence and its aftermath. I had only glanced at various synopses, at the AFI Docs website or on Flixster. Mostly I was struck by the film's marketing image (above) of an enormous, surrealist fish perched on a shore, and the column of pink-clad figures who seemed to have emerged from its mouth. But I was also interested in the film's relationship to violence and spectacle, both locational and mediatized, having researched Bombay's Hindu-nationalist Shiv Sena and its rise, also from the mid-'60s, to prominence nationally and within Maharashtra state thanks in large part to its public spectacles of violence—spectacles that were further spectacularized by Indian media, particularly via U.S.-influenced Bollywood gangster films. I was curious to see if The Act of Killing rebuked this spectacle and offered something else: a counter-spectacle, if you will. Instead, the film amounts to little more than a Western propaganda piece about the evilness of others, without acknowledging the role of the U.S., for instance, in Suharto's removal and in provoking the anti-Communist fervor that animated the mass killings, nor the role of the U.S. director Joshua Oppenheimer, without whom there'd be no filmic practices of the now-grizzled members of the Pancasila Youth, the ostensible subjects—that is, objects—of... Continue reading

And then my phone ran out of juice as we walked down the above block, which I happen to live on. (Would that I could've gone up and gotten a fresh phone.) The march continued east on 12th Street, north on 1st Avenue, west on 23rd Street, north on 6th Avenue, west on 33rd Street, and north on 7th one block to 34th Street, where we were stopped. I peeled off at that point but the march continued west on 33rd and then, from what I heard, to Times Square. No justice, no peace. Continue reading

In this third and final excerpt from my recent work on U.S. national security, I consider the case of Assata Shakur, retroactively designated a "domestic terrorist" under the post-9/11 Patriot Act. The continuity between the national-security response to black radicalism and the present heightened response to Islamic radicalism made me think about security at large as an inherently racialized, racist form. -- “We must define the nature and scope of this struggle or else it will define us,” President Obama said in his recent “dronetánamo” speech in which he laid out plans to scale back the war on terrorism. But the example of Assata Shakur shows how much terrorism already “defines us.” On May 2nd, just weeks before the President’s speech, Shakur was added to the FBI’s “most wanted terrorist” list—40 years after her alleged murder of a New Jersey state trooper. Long in exile in Cuba, she was first designated a terrorist in 2005, under the Patriot Act’s reconceptualization of “domestic terrorism.” According to this new definition, which is U.S. law, an act of domestic terrorism must A) involve acts dangerous to human life that are a violation of the criminal laws of the United States or of any State; B) appear to be intended (i) to intimidate or coerce a civilian population; (ii) to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion; or (iii) to affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination, or kidnapping; and C) occur primarily within the territorial jurisdiction of... Continue reading